Psych2LKIT

Category: Opiate Addiction

There are a couple new books about that jettison the ‘wisdom’ spouted in AA. I spent thirty years in “the program” but as a person with bipolar disorder and then three years of uncontrolled tardive dyskinesia, if I shared anything about these issues wanting to make me drink, the whole room would erupt into haters and ‘me toos’

I got tired of tripping on IED’s and left the program over two years ago. These books shed light on different approaches to treating addiction and point out that AA’s success rates, and this includes people who go to expensive thirty day rehab…those success rates are 3-5%. Of course this goes way up if a person stays, gets a sponsor and works the steps. Then the success rate for lifelong sobriety is thirty percent. But what about the other seventy percent of us??? Don’t we deserve an alternative?

“Unbroken Brain” suggests that addiction (and she’s a former opiate addict now successful author and freelance writer) is a ‘learning disorder’ in other words, by experimenting with drugs to begin with, we activate the dopamine neurotransmitter and if we could just unlearn that and replace it with a healthy way of getting ‘high’ we’ll be ok.

“The Sober Truth” points out many flaws in AA philosophy and the multimillion dollar rehab industry and other 12-step treatment providers, who think “abstinence only” is the only way to go. If you remember 8 in 10 people who start taking opiates took it for pain and still have that pain, then you can see that for someone like the late Prince, who had excruciating hip pain, “abstinence only” is not going to cut it. They always relapse and take the same amount they used to take, but their tolerance has gone down and they OD. It’s a sad story.

Just like with heroin addicts, methadone, always has been legal and it’s proven that it cuts OD’s by 75% percent, cuts down on disease transmission (dirty needles) and cuts relapse on dangerous drugs like Heroin that’s laced with God knows what like crazy!

Everyone screams and demonizes the opiates instead of laying the blame where it belongs…the addicts who abuse the pills.

Oxycontin was terrific in terms of being safe and time-released except addicts figured out a way to trick with the coating so they could get the ‘rush’ of the entire dose right away instead of letting it slowly time release.

And we pay for the ‘high’ they were chasing. I don’t take Opiates anymore but I did so safely and conservatively for twelve years. It bought me a quality of life I can only dream of now. Unfortunately, I wasn’t able to take them anymore due to side effects. Since I stopped, I’ve canceled gym membership, let my pilates classes expire and can’t write nearly as long as sitting in the chair aggravates it.

When I was driving home from my tardive dyskinesia neurologist appointment in Gainesville I read an article that made me shudder. It could be me. Prisoners being driving from one facility to another are at the mercy of untrained people who drive the vans and have more of a trucker mentality. It’s about how many people you can get quickly from one place to another. So they jam the vans, deprive the prisoners of bathroom breaks, etc. When a mentally ill person doesn’t get their meds for three or four days they can decompensate and start babbling loudly or drooling, one person died of Xanax withdrawal.

I thought…’It could have been me.’ I’ve been privileged to have good care and avoid the hospital for seventeen years but when my former bff called the cops on me and told them I was suicidal, I was in a holding area very similar to a county jail. A long time ago, the eighties, I had legal problems re my drug habit and went to jail five times, so I know what I’m talking about.

The problem is the privatization of public prison and jail systems. These people know how to penny pinch but it’s at the expense of those they transport and their human rights.

There is this guy in our daily paper who offers answers to questions. I wrote my questions about buprenorphine. I can never get the spelling right.

One of the articles about Prince’s death dealt with the stigma of using one drug to treat a problem with another. But if he really had ruined his hips and was in pain, then he’d have needed pain care. You want to know what I think? He didn’t know who to trust. It’s tricky. You’ll see in this letter that I don’t know who to trust either. So I wrote this guy at Cornell. I keep looking for more stories on this subject but can’t find any. Is there some conspiracy theory I’m unaware of? Could big pharma be THAT big to get in the way of generic 40 dollar a month w/o insurance priced Subutex? It’s been FDA approved for chronic pain since 81 so what’s the big issue with it? So I wrote a letter to this Cornell ‘ask the doctor’ newspaper guy at ‘ToYourGoodHealth@med.cornell.edu. If you want to know the deal as badly as I do and you never see his answer posted in my blog, feel free to ask him again these questions..It’s a public concern and a growing epidemic that some say could be solved with Suboxone, Bupenorphrine. Why Not? Why?

Dear Dr. Roach

I’ve had chronic lumbar pain for a decade. It’s impacted by a neurological condition called Tardive Dyskinesia that’s similar to Parkinson’s. I have uncontrollable muscle spasms and yelp. I’ve had every interventional pain management injection available and have spent thousands on physical therapy, pilates, herbs, eat an anti inflammatory diet, have done chiropractic, massage and acupuncture. I use mindful meditation while listening to music to. Still, I need my meds. And hate that.

I don’t take short actings. I’ve made days-long medication ‘vacations’ to work my tolerance/dose down to 1/3 of what it was a year ago. Even at a lower dose, the constipation is unbearable. Even on an all raw foods diet.

After a few ortho surgeries I’d been on high dose synthetics like Demerol and I had no constipation. When Prince died I read about the use of buprenorphine for chronic pain at the California “Recovery Without Walls” clinic. The use of a sublingual patch, a different way of taking it puts less strain on the liver and kidneys as they don’t have to metabolize it. The few shreds of coverage I read in the Washington Post and said Bupenorphine received FDA approval for chronic pain back in 1981. Yet one article about a D.C. based doctor recounted how she’d had to falsify patient’s diagnoses in order to get them treated and off of opiates for good. That’s what I want. If these synthetics truly are the second coming for long term noncancerous pain (Claimed by the newer “Butrans” transdermal patch) with a lower side effect profile and a ceiling on respiratory effects and overdose potential, why do the doctors using it claim there have been ‘challenges and conflicts’ preventing its’ widespread availability and use?

Why do some local doctors (often trained in other countries) insinuate that bupenorphrine would help my chronic pain while other doctors angrily claim it’s illegal to use it for that purpose? What are the downsides to this medication that I’m not hearing about? Allison Strong Hollywood Florida 954-922-4310

There is this guy in our daily paper who offers answers to questions. I wrote my questions about buprenorphine. I can never get the spelling right.

One of the articles about Prince’s death dealt with the stigma of using one drug to treat a problem with another. But if he really had ruined his hips and was in pain, then he’d have needed pain care. You want to know what I think? He didn’t know who to trust. It’s tricky. You’ll see in this letter that I don’t know who to trust either. So I wrote this guy at Cornell. I keep looking for more stories on this subject but can’t find any. Is there some conspiracy theory I’m unaware of? Could big pharma be THAT big to get in the way of generic 40 dollar a month w/o insurance priced Subutex? It’s been FDA approved for chronic pain since 81 so what’s the big issue with it? So I wrote a letter to this Cornell ‘ask the doctor’ newspaper guy at ‘ToYourGoodHealth@med.cornell.edu. If you want to know the deal as badly as I do and you never see his answer posted in my blog, feel free to ask him again these questions..It’s a public concern and a growing epidemic that some say could be solved with Suboxone, Bupenorphrine. Why Not? Why?

Dear Dr. Roach

I’ve had chronic lumbar pain for a decade. It’s impacted by a neurological condition called Tardive Dyskinesia that’s similar to Parkinson’s. I have uncontrollable muscle spasms and yelp. I’ve had every interventional pain management injection available and have spent thousands on physical therapy, pilates, herbs, eat an anti inflammatory diet, have done chiropractic, massage and acupuncture. I use mindful meditation while listening to music to. Still, I need my meds. And hate that.

I don’t take short actings. I’ve made days-long medication ‘vacations’ to work my tolerance/dose down to 1/3 of what it was a year ago. Even at a lower dose, the constipation is unbearable. Even on an all raw foods diet.

After a few ortho surgeries I’d been on high dose synthetics like Demerol and I had no constipation. When Prince died I read about the use of buprenorphine for chronic pain at the California “Recovery Without Walls” clinic. The use of a sublingual patch, a different way of taking it puts less strain on the liver and kidneys as they don’t have to metabolize it. The few shreds of coverage I read in the Washington Post and said Bupenorphine received FDA approval for chronic pain back in 1981. Yet one article about a D.C. based doctor recounted how she’d had to falsify patient’s diagnoses in order to get them treated and off of opiates for good. That’s what I want. If these synthetics truly are the second coming for long term noncancerous pain (Claimed by the newer “Butrans” transdermal patch) with a lower side effect profile and a ceiling on respiratory effects and overdose potential, why do the doctors using it claim there have been ‘challenges and conflicts’ preventing its’ widespread availability and use?

Why do some local doctors (often trained in other countries) insinuate that bupenorphrine would help my chronic pain while other doctors angrily claim it’s illegal to use it for that purpose? What are the downsides to this medication that I’m not hearing about? Allison Strong Hollywood Florida 954-922-4310